“The Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice,” by Bernardo Bellotto, via the National Gallery of Art . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subs...

tl;dr: If you earn considerable 1099 income in the US, report your business expenses to the IRS. Federal Income Tax Tariffs funded most US government spending until 1913. 0% 25% 50% 75% 100% 1850 1900 1950 2000 Customs Excise Corporate Individual Payroll Other The composition of US federal receipts, via census.gov and whitehouse.gov . After the 16th Amendment legalized federal income tax, Congress levied it via the 1913 Revenue Act: a 1% income tax on high-earne...

Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely , without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction to Mac mini power button complaints . While I agree the M4 mini's power button is in a really dumb spot, that's not why I care about this feature. The two bigger use cases for me have been a pain for years: Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely , without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction ...

After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive . It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal. I'll illustrate this with an example. I was hacking on Datasette Agent today when I noticed a glitch: a horizontal scrollbar that shouldn't be there in the jump menu chat prompt. I snapped this screenshot: Then I started a fresh claude session in my datasette-agent checkout, dr...

Today we bid farewell to Ho Chi Minh City on our Vietnam 2026 trip for a couple of days to stay in Vũng Tàu on the coast. The small peninsula was a popular retreat for the French colonialists, and is famed within Vietnam for its seafood and large beach. HCMC has become so big that the Vũng Tàu is officially considered part of its metro area, but it still has its own distinct history, character, and charm. Before setting off, we had a salt coffee with condensed milk and a baguette from ...

All tests were executed against Kafka 4.3.0 using Dimster.  In the last post Broker-Visible vs Client-Local Parallelism we looked at two ways of scaling Kafka consumption. The final unit of parallelism can be visible to the broker, as consumers, or it can be local to the client, as threads, virtual threads, async tasks, or some other execution mechanism hidden behind a smaller number of consumers.  Broker-visible parallelism is simple to reason about: if each consumer processes records seria...

The keyword in politics these days is ‘sovereign’. What few will admit is that it is effectively the adoption of the American strategy: Make America Great Again. In other words, reindustrialization of key sectors of the economy. The UK used to be a computing champion. Our chip designs (ARM) originated from the UK. Canada had BlackBerry, everyone was using Canadian phones. Like Canada, many countries have progressively slid into financialization. Huge banks and bank-related businesses, su...

Tigris is S3-compatible, which means you can point the AWS SDK at it and most things just work. The catch is that the Tigris-exclusive features—bucket forking, snapshots, object renaming, and the like—need verbose workarounds because the AWS SDK doesn't know they exist. So we wrote a Go SDK that does. It comes in two flavors: the storage package is a drop-in replacement for the standard S3 client with first-class methods for the Tigris-specific operations, and simplestorage is ...

Approaching a junction, I looked up to the sky and saw a hole in the clouds unlike any I have seen before. I usually look up to the stone that must be at least a hundred years old: to the grey buildings – homes – in which I see so many stories. But today the blue sky and the white cloud stood out; the life of the city is made as much in Nature as it is in architecture. I was on my way to a coffee shop, one I frequent because every time I go it is quiet. Classical music plays in the backgroun...

I can think of worse places to walk the dogs... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . I can think of worse places to walk the dogs... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ...

It’s 11.35am, 27°, clear sky with only a few tiny little clouds here and there. I’m standing at the same parking spot where I ended the previous walk, and I’m about to tackle segment number 5 of this 10-part loop. Contrary to what I did up until this point, this time I’m gonna try something different: I’m going to write this post as I go, rather than writing it the following day. I’m typing this in a chat with myself, on Telegram. We’ll see how this goes. If I end up enjoying ...

I’ve been managing my dotfiles with GNU stow for a few years. I even wrote a piece with a corny title about that setup back in 2023. Stow served me well, but managing symlinks across multiple devices slowly became a pain in the butt. So I started looking around for a better tool and even considered writing my own. Then a colleague pointed me to chezmoi , and so far I’m liking it a lot. It does everything I need, and I’ve started tracking my agent skill files with it too. The ma...

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Bibliography How can you condense the millions of words that have been written about privacy into a blog post? The answer is that you can’t; all you can do is point at a few landmarks, like a tour guide trying to show people Toronto in an afternoon. ...

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After five weeks in New Zealand, it was time for a change of scenery. Following my original plan and given the proximity, Australia was the obvious choice. However, I had to shorten my stay to reach Japan in time for the cherry blossoms. I decided to split the next two weeks between Melbourne and Sydney. I was also looking forward to finally slowing down and staying more than 1–2 nights in the same place (or so I thought 😅). Just a few days before my arrival, Melbourne was named the "...

LangChain recently posted about a database they built. I liked the post quite a bit, I thought it was pretty well written and did a really good job of explaining their architecture. It highlighted for me some of the interesting database challenges and workloads that are consequences of AI. This is an "observability database," which sits sort of outside the traditional OLTP/OLAP dichotomy, but leans a bit on the OLAP side. It exists to collect data from a bunch of different sources (in LangCh...

There is a bit of schadenfreude on Twitter right now about Anthropic being hit by the US government’s export control directive to suspend access to Fable and Mythos . Anthropic and their leadership have spent a lot of time and effort describing its own technology as dangerous and in need of strict controls and regulation. Now that the US government appears to have taken that framing seriously and told them to turn it off for foreign nationals I can see why people are making fun of that situ...

At this moment, a spacecraft is headed from Earth to Europa, an ice-veiled moon of Jupiter thought to contain an ocean similar in some ways to one of our own. NASA engraved a metal plate affixed to the spacecraft with a poem, commissioned from Ada Limón during her time as poet laureate of the United States. It reads, in part: And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of… Source At this moment, a spacecraft is headed from Earth to Europa, an ice-veiled moon of Jupiter tho...

Hello, It's Friday again Flipping more things Klonan After we introduced the concept of flipping back in 1.1 ( FFF-364 ), it became more and more annoying to have certain entities prevent flipping. While some things will always be impossible (Train stops, Rail signals, etc.), we do what we can. Pumpjack The Pumpjack was always a touch strange with the rotations, maybe it was adding to the puzzle, but these days we are more of the opinion it is just making things more awk...

This article is Part 5 of my series on India’s launch vehicle crisis. A space program can only move as swiftly and flexibly as its orbital rockets, and India has been amid a grinding halt. As such, I’ve been focusing my  Indian Space Progress  blog & newsletter on fully exploring this situation before resuming coverage of national space activities at large. Part 1  of the article series  reviewed the state of India’s orbital launch vehicles , revealing a bleak picture of ambitious go...

When you see AI model pricing pages, you usually see things broken down like this: Model Context Length Max CoT Tokens Max Output Tokens Input Price (Cache Hit) Input Price (Cache Miss) Output Price deepseek-chat 64K - 8K $0.07 / 1M tokens $0.27 / 1M tokens $1.10 / 1M tokens deepseek-reasoner 64K 32K 8K $0.14 / 1M tokens $0.55 / 1M tokens $2.19 / 1M tokens Source: DeepSeek API Docs If you manage to have most of your input tokens be cached, you save a huge amount, in...

There are two ways to look at the P v NP problem, as a formal mathematically defined conjecture as a Clay Millennium Prize Problem, and as the more intuitive notion that everything efficiently verifiable is efficiently computable and the implications that has on our ability to compute. I've written considerably about how artificial intelligence has affected the latter. In particular, how AI and other advances in computing have brought us to this Optiland of getting most of the good implicati...

As part of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Aerial Logistics Connector (ALC) program that aims to provide logistics to distributed units in a contested environment, Shield AI, Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, L3Harris Technologies, and Parry Labs completed their fourth autonomous flight test period on the H145 helicopter. For the first time, the H145 flew with systems from all four companies fully integrated on the aircraft. During testing, Hivemind mission autonomy successfully detected landing zone obst...